When Sigmund Freud introduced
psychoanalysis into the United
States in 1909, he was surprised by the enthusiastic
American reaction to his ideas. “My short visit to the New
World,” he wrote, “encouraged my self respect in every way.
In Europe I felt as though I were despised but in America I found myself received by
the foremost of men as an equal…. This was the first official recognition
of our endeavors.”[1]

In Europe, Freud had a sprinkling
of followers, notably in Vienna, Zurich, Berlin, Budapest and London.
In the United States,
so enthusiastic was his American audience that, only a year after his visit,
psychoanalysis had taken root in a fertile soil. In 1910, the
Psychopathological Association was organized in Washington,
D.C., followed by the New York Psychoanalytic
Society in 1911 and the American Psychoanalytic Association in Baltimore in 1914. In 1917, the JohnsHopkinsMedicalSchool
offered regularly cataloged courses in psychoanalysis – the first medical
school to do so. And, in these early years following Freud’s visit, many
Americans were fascinated by the English translations of his Interpretation
of Dreams (1913) and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1914).

That Freud was an atheist and a Jew
no doubt weighed very heavily against a fair hearing for psychoanalysis in Austria, a
predominantly Catholic country with a long tradition of anti-Semitism.
Catholics rejected psychoanalysis not on its merits as a new scientific
discovery, but rather on the basis of its founder’s religious views. This
Catholic opposition was so vigorous and so vocal, it
gave rise to the impression that all religious faiths were opposed to Freud.

A study of the American religious
reaction to psychoanalysis shows on the contrary that, with Catholics in the
minority, there was no significant outcry against Freud from either Protestants
or Jews. Protestant ministers were among the first to popularize Freud,
declaring as early as 1909, the year of Freud’s visit, that as physicians of
the soul, clergymen had a close interest in Freudian psychology and this new
therapeutic method. There were Jewish rabbis who claimed Freud as a great
Jewish healer in the tradition of the ancient prophets. It is striking
how many of Freud’s early followers in the United States were of Jewish
origin, including his first translator, A.A. Brill. And very influential
in opening the door for Freud were the faith-healing movements, notably
Christian Science, New Thought and the Emmanuel Movement, all preaching a
gospel of health and happiness and stressing the influence of the mind on
mental health.

The favorable Protestant response
to psychoanalysis stemmed from the partnership it had established with
scientific psychology in the late 19th century, seeking an
understanding of the nature of religious belief as well as insight into mental
illness at a time when the medical sciences were unprepared to deal with the
functional approach to neurosis. Freud probably received more abuse from
the conservative core of the American medical profession than from the entire
ministerial profession. This is not to say that Protestant clergymen,
liberal or conservative, were not offended by Freud’s anti-God
pronouncements. But they did not let Freud’s religious views prejudice
them against psychoanalysis as they understood it.

William Langer, speaking of the
rapid and enormous popular reception of Martin Luther, said: “It is
inconceivable that he should have evoked so great a popular response unless he
had succeeded in expressing the underlying unconscious sentiments of large
numbers of people in providing them with an acceptable solution to their
religious problems.”[2]
Could the same be said of Freud? Was the rapid growth of the
psychoanalytical movement in the United States related to the
possibility that psychoanalysis could further spiritual ends, indeed, be good
for the soul?

It has been said that those who
accepted psychoanalysis during its first decade had already given up their
belief in a personal God. Freud had noticed “an extraordinary increase”
in the neuroses with the decline of orthodox religious faith. Jung was
also impressed by this correlation, feeling that a religious problem was
involved in most, if not all, of his cases.

The American soul had been
disturbed by not only the scientific challenge to orthodox Christian belief in
the latter part of the 19th century, but by the rapid economic and
cultural changes taking place in American life – changes resulting from the
transformation of the American economy from rural and small-town to industrial
and urban. Traditional ways of life had eroded, producing a host of
so-called “nervous disorders”. If diet, sedatives, patent medicines, rest
and work cures, hypnosis and electric shock failed, the neurotic was almost
certain to find himself at best tolerated, and at worst distinctly unwelcomed
by his physician. The clergy, as traditional caretakers of the soul, had
also been unsuccessful in healing their disturbed parishioners.

In 1908, a year before Freud’s
visit, the Reverend Robert MacDonald of the WashingtonAvenueBaptistChurch in New York told his congregation:

Man’s modern way
of living with all its hurry and scurry has gotten on his nerves. He
sleeps poorly, is depressed and melancholy. He is dyspeptic and sluggish
and miserable. The same man who will not listen to a purely spiritual
appeal wants help and wants it badly….Now for the first time, psychology
reveals an immense subconscious realm which in everyday life is susceptible to
impression, suggestion and influence – to spiritual hypnosis.[3]

The term “spiritual hypnosis” used
by the Reverend MacDonald reflects the interest of numerous Protestant
ministers in this psychological technique, employed when traditional pastoral
counseling failed. Indeed, Freud’s lectures at ClarkUniversity in 1909 coincided with the high point of American
popular interest in hypnosis, the power of suggestion and faith healing.
William James was so impressed with the widespread activity in “mind-cure”, he likened it to a wave of religious activity analogous in
some respects to the spread of early Christianity, Buddhism and Mohammadism.[4]

Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science
was the most prominent of the mind-cure movements and eventually became a
church. Horatio Dresser’s New Thought worked within the Protestant
churches. The Emmanuel Movement established a partnership between the
Episcopal Church in Boston and Boston’s neurologists to put mental healing
on a scientific basis. These three movements emerged to address the need
for a new approach to mental illness and to involve man’s spiritual life in the
process.

Christian Science had its roots as
far back as 1840 when Mary Baker Eddy’s mentor, Phinneas Parkhurst Quimby, the
son of a blacksmith in Portland, Maine, had become interested in mesmerism shortly after
it had been introduced into the United
States by the Frenchman Charles Poyen in
1836. Quimby’s unusual skill with hypnosis found him giving public
demonstrations. Before long, he was asked to examine the sick with the
thought that hypnosis might restore health.

Quimby, whose unpublished papers
have been available in the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress,
eventually gave up hypnosis for what he called the “talking cure”. Instead
of putting the patient into a mesmeric sleep and, by suggestion, implanting the
idea of his getting well, Quimby would sit by his patient, listen to a detailed
account of his troubles and talk things over. When he had some idea about
the patient’s problems he made suggestions for a change of attitude – to remove
the “error” in the patient’s mind and establish the “truth”. Error for
Quimby did not preclude the existence of physical disease as it did for his
famous patient, Mary Baker Eddy.

Like Freud, Quimby needed a theory
to explain why his method effected cures. Unlike
Freud, he turned to religion to find it. He studied the New Testament for
clues to Jesus’ success in healing and came to the conclusion that Jesus healed
through “Divine Efficiency” and that he, Quimby, had received some of this
“Divine Efficiency”. He referred to his method as “spiritual healing”.[5]

Mary Baker Eddy had been cured by
Quimby after years of neurotic suffering. From Quimby she borrowed the
idea that disease was an “error”, or wrong thinking, and had to be removed so
that the “truth” could take its place.

In 1866, two years after Quimby
died, Mary Baker Eddy was out on the road preaching first “moral science”, then
Christian Science. Many of her students in the early days of the movement
went forth as “mental healers” after a course of twelve lessons. Eddy’s
metaphysics resembled extreme philosophical idealism. Mind was real, body
unreal. Mind was moral truth, matter was mortal error. Disease, for
Eddy, did not exist except in the mind. Despite its strange theories, the
movement grew. Science and Health, her “Key to the Scriptures”
first published in 1875, was by 1900 in its 190th edition.

In 1908, the Reverence William D.
Maxon of ChristChurch,
Detroit,
observed:

The Christian
Scientists have a larger number of adherents than the Episcopal Church with all
its learning, power and wealth. They have gained in 20 years more than we
have gained in 300 years….This multitude of people is just as great a reproach
to the medical profession as to the church.[6]

The social standing of the average
Christian Scientist was in the upper brackets of the middle class. How many of
these adherents went all the way with Mary Baker Eddy’s extreme metaphysics is
a question. It could be assumed that, as in the case of psychoanalysis,
many were glad enough to get some relief from their sufferings without worrying
about the theory. William James, for example, said he could make nothing
of Freud’s dream theories and suspected Freud of being what he called a
“regular hallucine”. Yet James felt the future of psychology lay in
Freud’s direction.

It has been said that Christian
Science churches would not have been built but for the fact of the “mental
cure”. A spirit of genuine religion was worked into mental healing.[7]

Christian Science and
psychoanalysis had common appeals for many Americans:

1.They
were optimistic, promising cures at a time when the medical profession had
little insight into the nature of the neuroses and were, therefore, unable to
help the increasing number of unhappy, “nervous” Americans.

2.Both
were posited on the assumption that health and happiness could be attained by
individual effort rather than by changing society – the more difficult task.

3.Both
offered a modern faith – in man and reason. Salvation could be equated
with not “a life hereafter” but with its original Greek meaning – to heal.

4.Both
laid claim to science when science was “in the air”.

Mary Baker Eddy was not the only
patient of Phinneas Parkhurst Quimby to believe in “faith healing”. Three
years after Quimby’s death in 1866, another patient, the Reverend Warren Felt
Evans, published what could be the first book on mental healing in the United States –
The Mental Cure (1869). Evans built upon Quimby’s basic idea but
drew from the teachings of Swedenborg and Hegel rather than from the New
Testament. Evans pointed out that Jesus healed first the mind, then the
body, and that the power of suggestion – “Go in peach”, “Be of good cheer” –
was the dynamic behind the miracles. Evans believed that diseases of the
body were caused by disorders of the spiritual life. He felt that those
who, like Quimby, had the “intuitive power” to detect the “morbid” state of
mind underlying the disease, could convert the patient
to a healthy state. The Reverend Evans’ views on the power of the sex drive
would sound familiar to Freud. In his book The Mental Cure, Evans
wrote:

The sexual or
conjugal love is more intimately connected with the inmost life of the spirit
and is the fountain of more unhappiness or misery than originates with any
other affection…[8]

The Mental Cure was widely
read. Along with his other works, Mental Medicine, Soul and
Body, and the Divine Law of Cure, it served as raw material ten
years later for Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health (1875).

In 1884, an editorial in the Boston
Morning Journal noted the expanding activity in mental healing:

Mind-cure, or
Christian Science, is called by people outside of New England a Boston craze. No
other city has developed the system to such an extent as Boston and probably in no other place are
there as many disciples of mental healing. Four recognized heads of as
many different schools reside in this vicinity and hundreds of followers swell
the list of believers. A system of healing, claiming so many adherents
and recognized so largely by many eminent men, deserves to be better understood
than it is at present by the large majority of people.

It is perhaps no coincidence that Boston, the fountainhead
of mental healing movements, was also the area where psychoanalysis made its
entry.

There were many who could not go
along with the theories of Christian Science but who, nevertheless, were ardent
supporters of mental healing as a method. Under the leadership of Julius
Dresser, another patient of Phinneas Parkhurst Quimby, a rival movement was
organized under the name “Mental Science” to distinguish it from Christian
Science. This movement was made up of small independent groups which
formed the Metaphysical Club in Boston
in 1895 and published a magazine called New Thought. The stated
purpose of the Metaphysical Club was:

To promote interest in and the practice of a true spiritual
philosophy of life and happiness; to show that through right thinking one’s
loftiest ideas may be brought into perfect realization; to advance the
intelligent and systematic treatment of disease by mental methods.[9]

The Club brought together many
writers in the mental science field and attracted a number of liberal religious
leaders. Unitarians and members of the Society of Friends became
interested in the mental healing aspects of New Thought. This movement’s
leaders, while addressing themselves primarily to mental health, applied their
basic principles to allied topics of social and religious import. New
Thought did not ask its followers to leave their churches but to exert the New
Thought influence within them. The New Thought movement spread beyond Boston. On the West
Coast it became Divine Science. Independent churches sprang up
identifying Jesus not as the traditional son of God but as a Divine Essence,
Spirit or Wisdom. New Thought borrowed heavily from Emersonian idealism
to give a liberal interpretation to the New Testament. It attracted many
intelligent, educated Americans.

Unlike Christian Science, New
Thought recognized the physical reality of disease. Health was considered
not so much a bodily condition as the accompanying mental state. Health
meant a sound mind in a sound body. As one New Thought writer stated:

The science of mental health springs out of an art of life
which each individual must acquire through far more intimate self-knowledge
than the average man possesses.[10]

One acquired this intimate self
knowledge through a New Thought Healer, who “finds a subconscious condition
that is fundamental to the physical disorder….Having admitted all the facts he
reserves the right to interpret them in his own way. He then defines
disease as a state of the whole individual….beliefs, fears, sensations,
subconscious conditions, habits, dispositions….”

After Freud’s visit, the New
Thought leaders believed New Thought and psychoanalysis had much in
common. Its founder, Horatio Dresser, in writing up a history of New
Thought, stated:

Psychoanalysis as practiced by Freud and his school is
nearer to New Thought than suggestive therapeutics or hypnotic therapeutics,
for the psychoanalysts do not practice hypnotism or mere suggestionism, their
efforts being to understand the hidden motive or mental cause of disease.
New Thought healers do not employ the Freudian technique,
they do not analyze dreams or specialize in nervous disorders traceable to
sexual suppression. But they might well assimilate some of the results of
Freudian psychology. That psychology is profound. It throws light
on the nature of desire, the will, and the love nature.[11]

Devotees of New Thought wished that
Freudian psychology were more spiritual, but this limitation did not dim their
appreciation of Freud’s contribution. Freudian psychology, by its very
neutrality, could be incorporated into the gospel of healing, and Christianity
was a gospel of healing for New Thought followers.

The New Thought movement grew
steadily from its origin in the 1800’s up into the 20th
century. It divided and subdivided into small “centers of truth” and
metaphysical clubs. While Christian Science had one text, Science and
Health, New Thought devotees published a variety of texts, many of which
had a large sale.[12]

William James was attracted to New
Thought, referring to it as “mind-cure”. In his Varieties of Religious
Experience, he describes his experience with a mind cure healer,
and, in a personal letter to a friend in 1894, he wrote:

I had a pretty bad spell….It is barely possible that the
recovery may be due to a mind-curer with whom I had 18 sittings….Two other
cases of brain trouble, intimate friends of mine, treated simultaneously with
me, have entirely recovered. It is a good deal of a puzzle.[13]

James believed that mind-cure had
made great use of the “subconscious life” by employing passive relaxation,
concentration and meditation and invoking “something like hypnotic
practice.” He stated further that, “To the importance of mind-cure the
medical and clerical professions in the United States are beginning, though
with much recalcitrancy and protesting, to open their eyes.”

The gospel of health and happiness
embodied in Christian Science and New Thought, like psychoanalysis, was a movement open to charges of quackery and cultism.
Yet these movements had to be reckoned with. Charles Reynolds Brown, Dean
of the YaleDivinitySchool,
stated in 1910:

Where physicians are indifferent to the value of mental and
spiritual forces in overcoming disease, then we may look for a full crop of
queer cults which have been misleading large numbers of people in recent
years. The people want to know what help there is along this line….The
rapid growth of these strange cults covered all over with such nonsense as
would tend to crush them is a significant symptom of our twentieth century
life. Let the physician be more fully instructed in the medical schools
and in the principles of psychology. The mood and the need of our age
imperatively demand it.

It is apparent that, by 1909,
Christian Science and New Thought had created a stir sufficient to put both
clergymen and physicians on the defensive. Freud could not have come at a
more auspicious time. The Boston
craze had become both a substitute for current forms of worship and for medical
practice. Psychotherapy was “in the air”.

“Scarcely a day passes,” wrote the
Reverend Lyman Powell of the Episcopal Church in Northampton, Massachusetts,
“when I do not receive inquiries as to the best books to read upon
psychotherapy.” The list of books which he “constantly
recommended” to people who came to him for “counsel and treatment” did not
include one title relating to God and the kingdom of heaven. All
were books on health and happiness and on modern psychology and
psychotherapy. The list itself illuminates the widespread popular
interest in, as well as the prevalence of, nervous troubles on the eve of
Freud’s visit. Among the Reverend Powell’s sought-after titles were:

Trine’s In Tune with the
Infinite placed responsibility for health and happiness upon the
individual, not upon society. This book had a remarkable response.
After the original printing in 1908, it was published in translation in 20
countries, in Esperanto and in raised letters for the blind. In 1957 it
received its eighth printing, passing the 75,000 mark.

Three years before Freud’s visit,
the Reverends Elwood Worcester and Samuel McComb of the Emmanuel Episcopal
Church of Boston brought the Protestant church into “mental healing” through
what came to be known as the Emmanuel Movement. In so doing they prepared
the way for the Protestant acceptance of psychoanalysis and laid the
cornerstone of modern pastoral psychiatry.

While Christian Science and New
Thought operated without reliance upon the medical profession, the Emmanuel
Movement sought to establish a working partnership between the Protestant
minister and the neurologist with the hope of placing mental healing on a truly
scientific foundation.

The Reverends Worcester and McComb
both had studied the “new psychology” in Germany and were well versed in the
latest developments in abnormal psychology and neurology, particularly those
segments that were pioneering in the functional approach to mental
illness. Worcester said, “Our psychology is the psychology of the
schools….We range ourselves on the side of such writers as Wundt, Fechner,
Paulsen, Janet, Forel, Freud, Prince, Sidis, James.”[15]

Worcester
received the support of Boston’s
progressive-minded neurologists in establishing a clinic within the Emmanuel Church
to diagnose and treat nervous disorders. The Movement was launched with a
series of four lectures delivered in the parish house on Sunday evenings.
The first lecture on “The Power of Control” was delivered by Dr. James J.
Putnam, Professor of Neurology at the HarvardMedicalSchool. Putnam,
three years later, became one of Freud’s leading supporters. The second
lecture on “The Value and Limitation of Suggestion” was given by Dr. Richard
Cabot. The third and fourth lectures were delivered by the ministers
themselves, who described the work they were about to undertake, referring to
it as “religious therapy” and commenting on some of the new psychological
approaches to nervous disorders. At the close of the fourth lecture Worcester announced that he
and McComb would be available in the parish the following morning along with a
staff of neurologists to diagnose and advise any person regarding their “moral
problems” or “psychical disorders”.

At the first morning’s clinic some
198 persons turned up who were suffering from a wide variety of complaints
including rheumatism, paralysis, indigestion and other purely physical ailments
wholly outside the concept of their work. As a practical joke, one of the
institutions for the insane had sent several busloads of its patients down to
the church to embarrass Doctor Putnam, a dramatic illustration of the derisive
attitude, in those days, of medicine toward the concept of functional neuroses.

The church clinic procedure called
first for a physical-neurological examination of each patient by the medical
staff. Those who were found to have organic diseases were referred to a
medical specialist outside. Those who were diagnosed as having functional
disorders were received in the rector’s study, where “in the confidence of the
confessional, the patient unlocks the hidden wholesomeness of his
subconscious.” These sessions went far beyond the confessional of the
Catholic Church, which did not attempt to probe the unconscious.

Although much of the therapeutic
work done by Worcester and McComb at the Emmanuel Church clinic was the
conventional pastoral counseling, they did not hesitate to use hypnotic
suggestion to “re-educate” their patients.

Dr. Richard Cabot, medical
consultant to the clinic, described the Emmanuel method as follows:

Of the classical methods of mental healing, explanation,
education, psycho-analysis, suggestion, rest-cure and work-cure, suggestion is
the one most used at Emmanuel Church. Suggestion is given to patients who
have been brought, by means of a quiet room, a comfortable chair, and soothing
words, into a relaxed and somnolent or sleeping state. Besides the direct
personal treatment of individuals in the morning and evening clinics (for such
they essentially are) Emmanuel Church maintains weekly public exercises which
may be chiefly described as Wednesday evening prayer meetings, with a twenty
minute talk on mental healing instead of a sermon, and a supper
afterwards….Among the topics discussed in the past year are: insomnia,
suggestion, anger, worry, peace in the home, what the will can do, Nervousness
and its cause, and prayer as a curative power.

The majority of cases treated in
the Emmanuel Church clinic were diagnosed as neurasthenia, insanity,
alcoholism, fears and fixed ideas, sexual neurosis and hysteria.

The Emmanuel Church clinics became
daily affairs, so great was the popular response. The movement caused
excitement from the start and led to controversies about the theories and
practices of its leaders. Questions arose both within the ministerial and
medical professions as to whether the ministers were competent to perform the
functions they had assumed.

Some of the Emmanuel Church’s own
parishioners objected, questioning the propriety of so many depressed specimens
of humanity queuing up day after day in the church’s halls waiting for
treatment. The issue reached the bishop of the diocese, the Right
Reverend William Lawrence, who settled it by letting Worcester have a free hand. Lawrence, however, never
alluded to the subject in public.[16]

The Emmanuel Movement received wide
publicity in the popular literary journals of the day. Edward Bok, editor
of the Ladies Home Journal, invited Worcester to write a series of articles for
the Journal. Under the title “The Results of the Emmanuel
Movement”, this series ran through five issues of the magazine (November
1908-March 1909) on the eve of Freud’s visit, resulting in over 5,000 personal
appeals to Worcester
for help. Other articles followed in The Independent, Outlook,
Harper’s, Current Literature and Century. Titles
included “Nervousness – A National Menace”, “New Phases in the Relation of the
Church and Health”, “The Emmanuel Movement and Nervousness”, and “The Dangers
of the Emmanuel Movement”.

Some medical critics charged that
Worcester and McComb were unfitted to engage in such psychotherapy and felt
they were usurping the rightful territory of medicine. Neurologist Ralph
W. Reed of Ohio
declared:

I am totally unable to find anything in the literature of
the cult that convinces me that their methods are religious at all. Dr.
McComb, himself, refers more frequently to the authority of Janet than of
Jesus.

The sensational press published
weird stories to the effect that the Reverend Worcester at Emmanuel Church had
raised a man from the dead by auto-suggestion. A Chicago paper headlined an article: “What Two
Ministers in Boston Are Doing to Make the Lame Walk and the Blind to See.”

In response to this adverse
criticism of their “Religious Therapeutics”, Worcester, McComb, and Dr. Isadore
H. Coriat published Religion and Medicine (1908), subtitled The Moral
Control of Nervous Disorders. This book called for the revival of the
minister as “physician to the soul” and exhorted the Protestant church to
reactivate the original mission of the Christian church as a ministry of
healing. It urged ministers to utilize the findings of modern psychology
and warned of the increasing threat of Christian Science to the established
churches. This work, Religion and Medicine, included a section
written by Dr. Isadore H. Coriat, one of Boston’s
prominent neurologists who helped launch psychoanalysis after Freud’s visit in
1909. Coriat called attention to Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday
Life (German edition). This may have been the first time Freud’s name
and work were brought before the American public (five years before Freud’s
first book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was available in English
translation).

The Emmanuel Movement was not
confined to New England. In New York City, the
Reverend Robert MacDonald of the Washington Avenue Baptist church, in an
article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, defined the movement as one that
extended the church’s usefulness to the saving of the whole man. “The
older appeal,” he stated, “was to the soul and one’s preparation for
eternity. This movement takes hold of his mental and bodily life and fits
him for daily living right here and now.”[17]

In Brooklyn, New York,
the reverend Lewis T. Reed preached a sermon entitled “Suggestive
Therapeutics,” emphasizing the power of suggestion and the subconscious.
The Reverend A.W.H. Hodder, a Baptist minister also in Brooklyn,
believed in the Emmanuel approach, as did the Reverend L. Ward Brigham of All
Souls Congregational Church.

On the West Coast, the Rector of
the Church of the Good Samaritan in Corvallis,
Oregon, wrote a primer for
setting up a “church class in psychotherapy.” In Atlanta, Georgia,
the Reverend Len G. Broughton said of the Emmanuel Movement:

… no movement in the church has travelled
so rapidly in modern times….In every section of the country it is being talked
about favourably and unfavourably
by both the church and the medical profession, while suffering humanity,
hitherto unaided, reaches forth its trembling hand with at least a faint hope
that the day is not far distant when there will come the long sought relief
from pain and suffering.[18]

In Chicago, Bishop Samuel Fallows
of the Reformed Episcopal Church called his “psychotherapic”
work “Christian Psychology” and stated with “positive authority that religious
therapeutics could cure want of confidence, sleeplessness, nervous dyspepsia,
melancholia, fear, mental depression, hysteria, anger and weak will.”

In San Francisco, the Reverend
Thomas Parker Boyd in his book The How and Why of the Emmanuel Movement
showed the art of healing had been practiced from earliest times, from the
witch doctor of old driving out the devil, to the modern therapist.
“Between these extremes of development are all the pathies,
shrine cures, bones of the saints, holy waters, quackery, charlatanism,
allopath, homeopath, isopath, osteopath, electric, botanic, magnetic, Christian
Science, mind cure, divine healing and what not.”

In 1909, due to the unfavorable
publicity the Emmanuel Movement received, Worcester and McComb adopted a policy
of eliminating as much as possible further attention to their work. They
discontinued the Church clinic but continued their therapeutic counseling
quietly, referring patients to outside physicians when indicated.

Freud apparently heard about the Emmanuel
Movement at the time of his visit to ClarkUniversity in 1909.
He is quoted as having said:

When I think that there are many physicians who have been
studying psychotherapy for decades who yet practice it
with the greatest caution, this introduction of a few men without medical or
with only superficial medical training, seems to me of questionable good.

William James was disappointed that
Freud should have taken this negative view. In a letter to Theodore
Flournoy, James wrote:

A newspaper report of the congress said that Freud condemned
the American religious therapy (which has had such extensive results) as very
‘dangerous’ because so ‘unscientific.’ Bah!

Despite Freud’s lack of enthusiasm
for their work, Worcester and McComb continued to support Freud and
psychoanalysis. In 1912, McComb wrote in Century magazine: “We owe
to the genius of Professor Sigmund Freud of Vienna the remarkable discovery which in this
realm is so revolutionary that it makes all preceding discussions almost
obsolete.”

It is quite clear that the Emmanuel
method of therapy was not psychoanalysis but counseling and hypnotic
suggestion. Worcester and McComb, like numerous neurologists in 1908 and
during the first few years after Freud’s visit, did not clearly understand the
difference between psychoanalysis and suggestion. James Putnam’s first
encounter with psychoanalysis led him to the conclusion that “the
psychoanalytic method does not differ much in principle from the other
methods.”

There may be a correlation between
the decline of the mental healing movements and the introduction of
psychoanalysis after 1909. The mental healing movements at their height
between 1890 and 1910 had given exclusive attention to conscious thought as the
“greatest power in the world,” and had relied on the power of suggestion to
change attitudes and effect cures. Christian Science and New Thought were
posited on the belief, deeply rooted in 19th century American
evangelical and transcendental thought, that spiritual insight could tap hidden
sources of energy. This optimism was one facet of what has been termed
“American innocence”. The Emmanuel Movement, on the other hand, drew less
upon 19th-century idealism and more on 20th-century
science. The Emmanuel Movement, in aligning itself with medicine, had
laid the cornerstone for the continually developing cooperation between
religion and psychiatry.

In 1939, the Committee on Religion
and Health of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America held a
symposium on “Christianity and Mental Hygiene”. This symposium was
notable for its orientation around Freudian principles. Not only did it
reflect the acceptance of psychoanalysis by a variety of participating
ministers, but also a comfortable familiarity with psychoanalytic concepts and
terminology – ego potential, identification, life force, libido and
others. The ideal goal of pastoral counseling was expressed as “the
ability of the minister to get at the roots of neurotic disturbances and not be
satisfied to accept surface motives for real motives.” Freud was hailed
as another Darwin:

Whatever one may think about the specific theories of Freud
and his followers, he must be recognized as the Galen or Darwin in the field of
psychotherapy. It was he who first mapped out the new road and devised a
vehicle by which it might be traversed. Certainly his most lasting
contribution will be the methods he devised for uncovering the hitherto
unrecognized underground motives of the mind.[19]

Today, although the psychoanalytic
star that shone so brilliantly for half a century has been dimmed somewhat by
new insights into mental illness and new methods of treatment, among religious
leaders there is a continuing interest in Freudian insights into human nature
and the use of those insights in pastoral counseling. Freud and the
gospel of health and happiness are still alive.

Those early religious movements –
Christian Science, New Thought and the Emmanuel Movement – attracted many
Americans who believed that mental health was, or should be, a function of
religion. This ideological kinship strengthened the image of Freud as a
mental healer and thus favorably influenced the American reception of psychoanalysis.

[19]
Federal Council of Churches, Symposium on “Christianity and Mental Hygiene,” New York, 1989: p. 12.

About the Author
Ruth Pedersen Hunsberger received her M.A. in American Intellectual History from
the University of
Rochester in 1961. Her
dissertation, from which this paper is adapted, was titled "The American
Reception of Sigmund Freud". Her later activities included serving as
research associate and speechwriter at the Legislative Reference Service, U.S.
Library of Congress, 1961-1963; and as Director,
American Field Service, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 1963-66. During World War II
she served as research assistant to General George Patton on the U.S. invasion
of French Morocco, 1942. Mrs. Hunsberger
spent the last years of her life at Brookhaven, in Lexington, Mass.She died there at age 97, in February, 2009.